A List of Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Works by Prosper of Aquitaine (c. coll. 21.3)

STUDIA PATRISTICA VOL. CXX Papers presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2019 Edited by MARKUS VINZENT Volume 17: Cineres extincti dogmatis refouendo? “Pelagianism” in the Christian Sources from 431 to the Carolingian Period Edited by RAÚL VILLEGAS MARÍN PEETERS LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT 2021 Table of Contents Raúl VILLEGAS MARÍN Introduction ......................................................................................... 1 María Victoria ESCRIBANO PAÑO Honorio, Flavio Constancio y la legislación anti-pelagiana de 418 .. 7 Jérémy DELMULLE A List of Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Works by Prosper of Aquitaine (c. coll. 21.3) ....................................................................................... 31 Richard FLOWER ‘I cut its neck with its own sword’: Tradition, Subversion and Heresiological Authority in the Praedestinatus ................................. 55 Matthieu PIGNOT Baptismal Exorcism as Proof of Original Sin: The Legacy of Augustine’s Liturgical Argument in the Early Medieval West .................... 79 Mickaël RIBREAU Pélage, Célestius et la controverse pélagienne dans les sermons, de Léon le Grand à Grégoire le Grand .................................................... 101 Giulio MALAVASI The Pelagian Controversy in Eastern Sources from the Council of Ephesus (431) to Photius..................................................................... 117 Raúl VILLEGAS MARÍN The Traps of the Heresiological Discourse: ‘Pelagianism’ in the British and Irish Sources ..................................................................... 135 A List of Augustine’s Anti-Pelagian Works by Prosper of Aquitaine (c. coll. 21.3) Jérémy DELMULLE, Paris, France ABSTRACT In his treatise Contra collatorem (c. coll. 21.3), published in 432/3 AD, Prosper of Aquitaine lists ten anti-Pelagian works written by Augustine, which he advises his adversaries and other readers to turn to, in order to better understand the unity and continuity of Augustine’s thinking on grace, free will and predestination. The aim of the present paper is to try to understand what guided Prosper in the choice of these ten titles and what his knowledge of this anti-Pelagian corpus might have been. By comparing the Contra collatorem list with the other lists of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian works already available at that time (in Augustine’s Retractationes or Possidius of Calama’s Indiculus) and by taking a look at Prosper’s many direct sources, it can be argued that Prosper had a first-hand knowledge of all the works he cited. Did this anti-Pelagian corpus already exist as such before Prosper, or did Prosper forge it himself? Even if this list seems to have had almost no impact after Prosper’s time, it certainly provides a very valuable testimony with regard to the question of the first diffusion of Augustine’s works in the years immediately following the death of their author. 1. Introduction The condemnation by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD of Nestorian heresy also sounded the definitive death knell – if I may say so – for another heresy: Pelagianism.1 Many times, indeed, polemists had stressed the strong kinship between Pelagius’ ideas and those of Nestorius. The decisions taken by the Council Fathers thus came, in their minds, as a confirmation of the victory of the doctrine on grace defended by Augustine, who died a few months earlier.2 1 I would like to thank Raúl Villegas Marín for his invitation to participate in the panel he organized and for his remarks. My thanks also go to Martine Dulaey and Shari Boodts for their review and their comments on a previous version of this article. 2 The Pelagian question was also the subject of several discussions during the council: see first and foremost Marie-Théophane Disdier, ‘Le pélagianisme au concile d’Éphèse’, Échos d’Orient 163 (1931), 314-33; Jean Plagnieux, ‘Le grief de complicité entre erreurs nestorienne et pélagienne. D’Augustin à Cassien par Prosper d’Aquitaine ?’, Mémorial Gustave Bardy = REAug 2.1-4 (1956), 391-402; Jakob Speigl, ‘Der Pelagianismus auf dem Konzil von Ephesus’, AHC 1 (1969), 1-14; Lionel Wickham, ‘Pelagianism in the East’, in Rowan Williams (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1989), 200-13. Studia Patristica CXX, 31-53. © Peeters Publishers, 2021. 32 J. DELMULLE However, in some parts of Gaul, the same people who were delighted with the outcome of the Ephesian Council were at the same time very concerned about the troubling surge in their regions of some apparently Pelagian positions: a few years earlier, a new controversy had indeed erupted in Marseilles and in Provence, which continued to raise the same problems on grace and free will.3 This explains why, even after Ephesus and at least until 432 AD, one could still feel the need to keep reading and explaining the treatises Augustine composed on these questions, essentially on the occasion of the Pelagian controversy.4 But what exactly was known about Augustine’s polemical production against the Pelagians in Southern Gaul in these decades? Which of the master’s works were likely to be reused by his continuators to oppose the new arguments put forth by the Provençal monks? There are no evident clues to answer this question. But there exists a very interesting testimony on this subject which, with the notable exception of Otto Wermelinger,5 has so far attracted little attention from scholars: I refer to a list of titles of Augustine’s works against the Pelagians, which Prosper of Aquitaine offers to his readers in his Contra collatorem, written just some months after the Council of Ephesus. It is this text that I propose to study in the pages to come, in order to compare it with other contemporary sources and to try to determine what Augustinian works were really available in Southern Gaul in the first half of the decade of the 430s AD. 2. Prosper’s ‘bibliography’ in c. coll. 21.3 In his Contra collatorem, composed in 432/3 AD, Prosper of Aquitaine vehemently attacks the doctrine put forth by John Cassian in his thirteenth Collatio ‘On the Protection of God’, which he considers to be an unfair and harsh criticism of Augustine’s latest works on grace and free will. While his treatise is based almost exclusively on a meticulous examination of his opponent’s opuscule, Prosper also uses arguments that cannot, for obvious reasons, be based directly on Augustine’s authority – which was not fully recognized among the 3 For a general overview of this post-Pelagian controversy and its different phases, see Donato Ogliari, Gratia et certamen: The Relationship Between Grace and Free Will in the Discussion of Augustine with the So-Called Semipelagians, Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium 169 (Leuven, Paris, Dudley, MA, 2003); Rebecca Harden Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency: A Study of the Semi-Pelagian Controversy, Patristic Monograph Series 15 (Macon, GA, 1996). 4 The year 432 AD is precisely the date that Otto Wermelinger chose as the end of the Pelagian controversy in his seminal book: Rom und Pelagius. Die theologische Position der römischen Bischöfe im pelagianischen Streit in den Jahren 411-432, Päpste und Papsttum 7 (Stuttgart, 1975). 5 O. Wermelinger, Rom und Pelagius (1975), 248 and note 158; the author proposes a first assessment on Augustinian works available in Gaul.